


Lost Sands

by PunnyMints



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Reader-Insert, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, Tusken Raiders - Freeform, also his name is cobb?????, but here we are, cobb vanth/reader - Freeform, i cannot believe i'm actually writing a reader and character story, i have come to this, i lov space cowboys, oh no, the last thing i need to do is start another seris but here i am
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27368377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunnyMints/pseuds/PunnyMints
Summary: A visiting archeology student hopes to find answers in the oceans of the sands of Tatooine. But she needs a guide.
Relationships: Cobb Vanth/Reader, Cobb Vanth/You, female reader - Relationship
Comments: 18
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

Why was it that research always ended in a very vague manner, pointing in the general direction of a planet? She groaned, teeth already grinding in horror to the prospect of getting sand in her boots, her hair, her everything. Already her bag felt too heavy. In preparation for this trip, she cropped her hair short, almost to her jaw, and the weightlessness of it caused the ends to curl and tickle her ears every time the ship shuddered. 

Which it did. A lot.

The student gripped her shoulder tightly between her fingers, the worn fabric bringing her comfort. Perhaps, after this, she should treat herself to a new holopad. The clunky one she had borrowed from the school was slow and old. Ancient.

And yet, here she was with this holopad that was probably made for Darth Revan, and she was on Tatooine, to finish her final thesis. 

The ship jolted again. With a noise of uncertianty, the student’s hand flew up and grasped on the grip that was hanging from the ceiling. Her hair, her damned hair, bobbed against the back of her neck and corners of her face. The ship must have been beginning its descent. Mumbling, she straightened up, fingers loose on the security offered from above. Her other hand gripped onto the bag slinged on her shoulder. She was going to hate this planet.

With a gutteral accent, the propelling capsule of horror that was supposed to be a transport screeched to a halt. She rocked forward, huffing smally, knuckles straining to support her. If the landing didn’t kill her, something else on this planet would.

The moment the ship settled, the young woman rushed for the doors, eager to get off the transport. Solid ground, even if it was just solid sand, would be welcoming to her. 

Oh, she could kiss that pit droid. The student gave a sigh of bliss, giving herself a minuite to settle her stomach. Maybe once her knees stopped causing so much racket, she could get started on hunting down the object of her final thesis. And then she would be done with school. 

Her boots, wrapped tightly like the old mummified species she had examined last year to keep out the sand, tapped softly on the ground. Her mind spun as the sands whipped past her exposed cheeks, stinging her skin a little, but she was too fascinated to truly care. How long had these sands been here? These grains could be the grains that Darth Vader skipped down as a child, that Revan once stalked, that the first fearsome Tusken Raiders had settled. As much as the young scholar disposed sand, it was impossible to deny that little things fascinated her.

She shook herself out of her trance. It was getting too warm out, with the sun almost blinding her. She glanced around, peering at the dome buildings, before settling on a wider set one. It looked busy, at least busier than the others. The scholar needed somewhere to go sit and research.

Upon entering the building, she gave herself a mental pat on the back. A cantina, with tables hidden in small enclaves where she could quietly research where she needed to take her next few steps.

She shuffled through the crowd, sliding a few credits across the counter. "I'll take whatever you have that's cool."

"Best we have is lukewarm."

"As long as it's not as hot as outside, I'll take it."

The barkeep smiled. He reached for the credits and took them. "Tell you what, stranger. I'm sure I can scrounge up some ice. Just for newcomers."

"Deal."

He grinned and tucked the credits in his pocket, crows feet from squinting at the sun and smiling showing beside his eyes. He knelt down behind the bar to, the scholar assumed, grab a glass and ice. "We don't get many young people visiting Mos Eisley alone, unless they're from somewhere else on Tatooine. Which you aren't."

The student startled somewhat. "How could you tell?"

"For one, leather boots don't stay that good looking out here long. May wanna get some new ones."

She glanced down at her feet, wiggling her toes in her shoes. "Oh. I guess you're right." She felt her lips quirk in thought, a nasty habit she despised. "I do kind of… stick out like a sore thumb."

Laughing, the barkeeper slid her the drink. "So, what brings you here?" He nodded at another customer and repeated the ritual of snagging their credits and kneeling to fix up their glass.

"I'm conducting a little bit of research. For school." She sighed, staring at the ice in her cup before taking a sip. "I'm surprised they sent me out here."

"Whatcha in school for? Bantha science?" 

Unable to resist a snicker,she shook her head. "No. Archeology."

"Treasure hunting."

"Well… no, I think, it doesn't count, because I have to take whatever I find back to school with me and turn it in. It's the last thing I have to do, and then I'll get to graduate." The words were coated with excitement, but she made a gallant attempt to keep it contained. "I'll be done with school. Forever."

The bartender slid a drink across the counter to the new customer. "Well, good luck to you, stranger."

She chirped her thank you and hurried away, drink in tow, to the furthest table. She slid into the seat, back to the wall so she could see everyone around her, and she tugged her holopad out of her bag.

Quietly sipping her drink, she caught a bit of ice from the cup in her mouth and savored the little bit of cold for the moments it lasted. She accessed her files and swiped through them, skimming the words and digital images of ancient texts. She hadn't been allowed to come to this planet with much, aside from a borrowed holo pad, a couple textbooks, and whatever survival supplies she had needed. They wanted living scholars, not dead students who would die as unknown treasure hunters searching for glory.

Graduating alive was step one. Getting this artifact before anyone else did so she could have a name for herself as an archeologist straight out of school was the icing on top. 

She swiped left, feeling her lips pursed lightly. Her eyes skimmed the words of the image. All she had as clues were old Jedi texts, written accounts from settlers past, and journals from archeologists who had tried to search before her. It was too bad the Tusken People only kept a verbal history. It was also bad she didn’t speak very good Tusken, a course she had skipped, because she never wanted to come to this planet, ever. 

But, lucky her, she had been randomly selected to pursue the path of the Kumumgah people, who once roamed the rich and lush jungles of Tatooine.  _ Lush jungles, my ass. I could be on literally any other planet, and I’m here, just my luck. _

She skimmed through more of th ebook, swiping back to the same tale written by the same unknown author with the same commentary:

_ “If you believe in the Legend of Lehon, Tatooine was once covered by a lush jungle and covered in vast oceans, not unline that of Kamino, where the Kumumgah dwelled, although minimum evidence has been found to support this.” _

Wasn’t that grand? A half a tale to go on, and even that was dispelled by researchers long before she had been assigned to this planet. She rubbed her forehead, feeling a headache sneaking in, leaning in to examine the artist’s rendition of the long gone species. The blue pixels flickered, but she could get a somewhat clear image. Humanoid, sunken ears, large black eyes, a thin layer of black hair atop the head. 

None of this was helpful.

She kicked the leg of the table and sunk back, shutting off the holopad. At this rate, she would be more likely to die of old age in sixty years and be awarded the degree posthumously than actually find shit.

Her glass was sweating. She picked it up and finished off the last of the ice, slowly packing up everything and walked to the counter, mood soured, setting the glass at the bar. “Thanks.”

“Thank you, little miss.” The barkeep said, distractedly.

“Would you happen to have a library on this planet?” One last ray of hope.

“Kid, we don’t have a library in this whole system. Closest you could get to anything resembling something with smarts is a translator droid.”

Her heart sunk. Nothing.

“I understand. Thank you.” She turned and hurried out, the delight at the sand dampened significantly as the winds picked up and stung her face.


	2. Chapter 2

She ducked into the docking bay, grimacing at the sky above her. It was still bright, too bright, and the winds were picking up. It was a struggle to even stay upright. Gritting her teeth tightly, the student drew her hand up to her eyes and cupped it, hoping to keep away the whipping dust. Why didn’t she pack any kind of goggles? A cough left her throat, struggling to keep sand out.

Muttering to herself, she moved quickly, ducking her head more. She had managed to squeeze in a little bit of reading dedicated to Tatooine weather. Sandstorms were not infrequent, especially in this season. The dry heat only made things worse. Never before had the young scholar thought she would have preferred high winds and rain to the heat. 

Her hair would drip with sweat, only to immediately evaporate. It would be a miserable existence on this planet. Why was this place still inhabited?

Forcing the negative thoughts to come to a screeching halt, she chastised herself. It was not her place to question people or where they came from. Perhaps they couldn’t bear to leave home, where their families and life were. 

The scholar squeezed her eyes shut and frozen as a particularly strong gust swept by her, yanking at the looser clothing draped around her. The scholar gritted her teeth and squatted down, lunging forward against the wind, reaching a hand forward to feel for a wall, a pillar, a doorway. Finally, her fingers brushed a solid surface. A crack ran along with it, diagonally in feature. The scholar followed it with a very fragile faith. 

_ Great. Not even my first day here, and I’m almost half dead. _

Her fingers curved around a sudden corner. She followed it, turning sharply, coughing again. The solid surface gave way to a gaping mouth in the wall, and she tumbled in. With a wheeze, she allowed her body to collapse on the ground, rolling over, back to the ground, and inhaled the fresh air.  _ Can I kiss the ground? I want to kiss the ground. _

Her mental strife of wooing the solid earth was intervened by a bump on her ribs. She ignored it for a moment, until it nudged her again, harder. “Ow- hey!” She scrambled up, shaking the dirt from her hair, frowning at the perpetrator.

A huge eye, sitting on the end of a bronzed cylindrical nose, examined her. How could a droid blink?

The scholar reached out with a finger and tapped the retina of the droid. It beeped in disdain, waving tiny arms at her, scolding. Despite herself, she giggled. “Well, you’re a funny little guy.” Her voice tinkered out with a small giggle to accompany it, and she coughed briefly, frowning. “You guys have a vacuum on this planet?” 

Once more, the droid beeped, the head swiveling on its wirey neck, rotating to glance back. Its motions paused briefly as if considering, running data. 

The numbers must have found an answer quickly, because almost as quickly as it had begun, the droid turned back and lilted mechanically, waving a rusty hand in a “come follow” motion.

Boots scraping the sand-casted floor, she scrambled to her feet, realizing she was a little bit wobbly as she depended on her own balance. Softly the girl stepped forward, taking in the vast space around her. The inside structure looked similar to the cantina she had taken brief refuge in. The steps led to a floor below the ground level outside, probably to keep cool during the hot days, and the home was more like a cavern; curved like a dome and dark, almost moist. She never thought she could miss such a small amount of humidity in the air. 

She blinked, eyes adjusting. The place was oddly barren. No furniture, except what had been carved up from the ground or into the walls, and a barricaded window. An abandoned house.

Why did the little droid lead her here?

As if on cue, she heard its alarmed beeping. Snapping out of her trance, she followed the sounds, which seemed to be emanating from behind a particularly shabby curtain. Quietly, she pushed it back, coughing again from the thick cloud of dust, and watched as the droid desperately pointed up at a self, with a small glowing light. 

“Oh! You needed to be plugged in, huh?” The scholar pushed her satchel back, out of her way, and bent down to pit it up. Gingerly, standing on tiptoe, she successfully placed it onto its charging dock. “There you are, little guy.”

The droid gave a satisfactory beep, folding in on itself and fully shutting down. The scholar grinned up at it, shaking her head softly and reaching a hand back to smooth the sand out of her wayward curls. The sand tumbled down to her shoulders and settled, probably forever embedded in her poncho. The first thing she needed to do the second she got off this planet was to take a shower. A nice, clean, long shower. And scrub away the sand. More than likely, and she grimaced at the thought, her scalp would always have traces of Tatooine in it. 

_ If I can get that artifact, that legend, if I can find evidence of the Kumumgah, I would walk through Tatooine ten- well, nine- times. _

She stood there, in the dimness, shaking out her hair, thinking. What she  _ wanted _ was a nice nap and to put her feet up, but what she  _ needed _ to do was, unfortunately, much harsher. Not nearly as grand a reality as a bath and a nap, but alas, it needed to be done.

Hopping on one foot, she yanked off a boot and shook as much sand about it as possible onto the floor, wasting no time to repeat the ritual with the other. Taking her time to wiggle her toes, the scholar plunked onto a stony bench, abandoning the shoes on the floor next to her and picking up her bag. The sight drew a shocked noise out of her. 

Oh. Kark. 

Sand settled on top of everything- including, unfortunately, her janky borrowed datapad from the school. “No. No, no, no.” Her hands clawed, grasping desperately at the tablet as she smacked it, watching dirt seep out of its protective seams. “Suns and Stars.” She mumbled, shoulders sagging. She hit it, hard, with her palm, because that always worked. Rule number one to old technology: if you smacked it as hard as possible, it would more than likely work. However, this was not one of those times where it fixed.

With a huff, the datapad was tossed onto the table as the holder sunk back, dejectedly. With no datapad, with no texts except the hard copied scrolls that she could barely translate, with no geographical and historical layout of the planet, how the hell was she supposed to get her job done?

Her throat made an unnatural noise. She wasn’t going to graduate. She wasn’t going to get it done. She would be damned on this planet, forever, until she found a single shred of evidence worth taking to the heads of the archeology department, or she would rot and hie in this hellhole.

How long had she been pacing? She didn’t realize she had been pacing. The student raked her hands in her hair again, out of sheer stress. Her brain was malfunctioning, flipping into overdrive, running through every possibility except the one that she needed to do.

She paced, and paced and walked, nails scraping at her hair and teeth gnawing the inside of her cheeks and her lips. Hesitantly, she drew in a long breath. 

Nothing was going to be found if she didn’t stop this.

Her steps slowed in their cadence, matching her breathing as it slowed and lengthened, in through her nose and out through her lips. (She should have bought balm, this planet wore away at her lips, the one part of her face she was half confident in.)

She reasoned in her head, trying to draw up all the information she remembered from her head into existence. A desert planet, that was supposedly once a jungle, before everything had eroded and dried up and the Kumumgh had evolved. Supposedly. Hopefully. 

What were jungles, after all? They had tall trees, thickets, layers. They were moist and dark, meaning if anything on this planet had survived from the past several thousand years, it would be somewhere dark and damp.

But this was a desert planet. Where was anything dark or damp here? 

No, she couldn’t stop now. She had gotten into this school, and Force, everything in this galaxy happened for a reason. The Universe simply could not have dragged her out this far and dropped her off without making it possible for her to do what she needed to do.

The main features of Tatooine, she recalled from a lecture, were the vast desert face of the planet, canyons, and mountains. There were deep valleys, and where there were mountains, there may be caves and caverns. At least, if her logic was correct. Hopefully, there wasn’t a gap in her theories, because this was what her future was riding on. 

Slowly she knelt down to the ground, tugging out the stylus for her datapad from her bag and scratching into the ground the list of what she knew:

_ Tatooine- _

  * _Once jungle, now dry_


  * Valleys, caves, caverns 


  * Underground?



  
  


But how in the world could she possibly get underground? She drummed her fingers on her chin again, pondering. She couldn’t just call an excavation crew. For one, she didn’t really hold that kind of power. And besides, as a student, she didn’t have the money or the time for that, and yet she couldn’t dig down deep enough to excavate anything of importance on her own. That alone would take decades, if not centuries.

The scholar drew her knees up under her body and relaxed back, staring at the ground, her makeshift list scratched in the dirt. She needed to try and get her datapad fixed, she needed a map, and she needed someone who knew this planet better than her. The student cursed herself softly, wishing that she had paid better attention in her Outer Rims courses. If she spoke better Tusken, she may have had more confidence to approach them for help. 

The storm outside blew still, picking up in speed. With a mumble, the student sunk back onto her rump and stared at the doorway, waiting for the storm to pass, impatient to get down to business and find this stupid lost civilization, which was probably being buried under yet another layer of dirt and grime, and all she could do was sit inside and let it happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Making you wait??? To meet the silver space fox????? abso-frickin-loutely my fellow hoes


End file.
